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Fortune Magazine: Secrets of Greatness. October 2006
*** Valuable Information ***
[This is the 2'nd and last Post ]
*What it takes to be great*:
Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work
By Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor-at-large October 19 2006: 3:14 PM EDT
(Fortune Magazine) — What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world’s premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was “wired at birth to allocate capital.” It’s a one-in-a-million thing. You’ve got it - or you don’t. Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful. Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant - talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great. Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, “The evidence we have surveyed … does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts.” To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness. The irresistible question - the “fundamental challenge” for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University - is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields. Scientists worldwide have conducted scores of studies since the 1993 publication of a landmark paper by Ericsson and two colleagues, many focusing on sports, music and chess, in which performance is relatively easy to measure and plot over time. But plenty of additional studies have also examined other fields, including business.
No substitute for hard work The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice. Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule. What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He’d had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, “The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average.” In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years’ experience before hitting their zenith. So greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing?
Practice makes perfect The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition. For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that’s deliberate practice. Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, “Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.” Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It’s the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.
The skeptics Not all researchers are totally onboard with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles. Two athletes might work equally hard, but what explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game? Researchers also note, for example, child prodigies who could speak, read or play music at an unusually early age. But on investigation those cases generally include highly involved parents. And many prodigies do not go on to greatness in their early field, while great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude. Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn’t do more than what he does; a five-footer will never be an NFL lineman, and a seven-footer will never be an Olympic gymnast. Even those restrictions are less severe than you’d expect: Ericsson notes, “Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s.” The more research that’s done, the more solid the deliberate-practice model becomes.
Real-world examples All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century’s greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don’t practice for three days, the world knows it.” He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti. Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he’d have been cut from his high school team.) In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice - passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow - practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up. Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that’s what it took to get even better.
The business side The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements - you can practice them all. Still, they aren’t the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information - can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude. Instead, it’s all about how you do what you’re already doing - you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it. Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it - each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company’s strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.
Adopting a new mindset Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they’re doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren’t just doing the job, you’re explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense. Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it’s the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset. Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don’t seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won’t come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says, “it’s as if you’re bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don’t know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don’t get any better, and two, you stop caring.” In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren’t lucky enough to get that, seek it out.
Be the ball
Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call “mental models of your business” - pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow. Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel (Charts) as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s (Charts) founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways. That’s a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice - and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.
Why?
For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That’s the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn’t be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from. The authors of one study conclude, “We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice.” Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, “Some people are much more motivated than others, and that’s the existential question I cannot answer - why.” The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life’s inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren’t gifted and give up. Maybe we can’t expect most people to achieve greatness. It’s just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn’t reserved for a preordained few.
It is available to you and to everyone.
From the October 30, 2006 issue
2 Comments »
Beyond the Fifth Degree
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I came home from work today, mentally exhausted .1
I hadn’t slept too well for the last several nights and was troubled by a recent comment to a post I had made a few days ago.
I laid down for a couple of hours, which I never do, dozing in and out of consciousness.
I must have been dreaming, because I awoke with a miriad of ideas clammering in my mind.
I sat up, trying to take everything in.
Maybe this was the answer I was looking for.
My mind was racing.
The phrase *Beyond the 5′th Degree* flashed to my mind.
What had it meant?
Still somewhat froggy, I started seeing the pieces come together:
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Indecision
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Reality
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Enlightenment
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Beyond the 5′th Degree
It was a natural progression to the apex of our relationships, our careers, our lives. The fifth degree being the black-belt, if you will, of the pyramid.
The accomplished, the point of mastery, the fifth degree is a destination, achieved by only the *select.*
Why *the select*?
Because only a select group of individuals ever reach the pinnacle of their self fulfillment.
INDECISIVE:
You can tell them by:
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Their lack of ambition
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Their lack of steadfastness
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Their focus on the *I want it now*
They are the *white and yellow belts* of society, primarily the youth.
REALISTIC:
You can tell them by:
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Their focus on committment.
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Their increase focus on building a future.
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Their attention to detail.
ENLIGHTENMENT:
You can tell them by:
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Their confidence in their abilities.
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Their knowledge of what it takes to succeed.
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Their focus on what’s really important.
THE 5′th DEGREE:
They have finally made it.
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They are the leaders of the world.
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They are sought after for their expertise
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They are courageous in spite of adversity.
BEYOND THE 5′TH DEGREE:
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“I will no longer be shaken by temporary setbacks.”
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“I will not worry about the future.”
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“I am the future !!!”
I hope this paradigm has brightened your awareness, opened your eyes, and brought you some solace.
Don’r worry,
You are a exactly where you were meant to be, at this time in your life.
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Conquer Indecisiveness,
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Face Reality Head-on,
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Embrace Enlightenment
GO ***BEYOND THE FIFTH DEGREE***
Bill
Create maximum success in your life
Working Hard is not the answer.Did you ever consider:
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20% of you efforts, brings 80% of your results.
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20% of your customers, bring 80% of your profits.
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20% of people, waste 80% of your time.
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20% of your skillset, brings in 80% of your income.
This 80/20 principle will teach you how to create maximum success in your life. This 80/20 principle is actually a business success principle.
What does it mean to think 80/20?
It actually means applying the Law of Imbalance.
What do I mean?
Consider this:
50% of your efforts, does not give you 50% of your results. There is an imbalance of how things are achieved. All of your efforts don’t bring you the same results. To start thinking 80/20, you have to ask yourself some new questions.
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What are my unique abilities?
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What are my core strengths?
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Am I spending time in areas of mybusiness that I don’t like or I’m not good at?
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Where is the place that I need to spend the most time?
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Then, figure out where you need to spend less of your time.
That’s what becoming an 80/20 person is!
Remember, all actions are not equal. What’s the benefit of thinking 80/20?
Less work, more fun, loving what your doing and accomplishing more.
Start creating maximum success in your life.
Start living by the 80/20 Law.
______________________________
Gather your Time!
Gather your Talents!!
Gather your Greatness!!!
Bill
How much are you worth
A Great Mentor of mine once said, “Every Level Of Income Demands A Different You.” (Mike Litman)
This statement makes a lot of sense to me. Whether you’re an employee, manager or business owner, you control the wage that you are paid.
I heard an interesting question that was posed, in reply to a statement made from one employee. It goes somthing like this:
“I’ve been working here for quite some time and I only make this amount of money. This is all the Company pays.”
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Question 1: ”That’s all the company pays?”
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Question 2: “You mean, no one else in the company makes any more than you?
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Question 3: “Neither the Vice President, the President or the Owner make more than you?
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Response 1: ” Well, of course THEY DO.”
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Response 2: ” They are the bosses.”
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Response 3: “They manage the company.”
WELL !!!
Who are you?
Don’t you have the same opportunity to do the same? They know more about the inner workings of the business?
WELL !!!
What’s holding you back?
Eveybody has to start somewhere.
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Start buiding on your strengths.
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Go back to school and get more education if you need to.
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Learn new skills.
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Give a little bit more effort.
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Volunteer for projects.
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Do more than is expected.
Achieve your personal best.
You can do it.
Keep in mind:
Every level of income demands a different you, a better you, a more VALUABLE YOU.
How much are you worth?
WELL !!!
Really, it’s up to you now.
Become someone GREAT !!!
Bill
There’s a Fortune in Failure
| Issue Date: February 2008 I stumbled upon this article, and it made a lot of sense.
WEB EXCLUSIVE: There’s a Fortune in Failure By Gary Bradt, PhD Abstract: Find the truth in the old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”It took Thomas Edison more than 1,000 tries to get the lightbulb just right. Yet, how many people give up if they don’t nail something perfectly the first time? The best baseball hitters in the game fail approximately two out of every three times they step up to the plate. Still, how many won’t step up and try something new unless success can be ensured first? The problem is how you think about yourself in relation to failure and its consequences. This article will challenge you to change the way you think about failure, and, in the process, change the way you think about yourself. Failure equals success 1. Define failure as learning. When a toddler falls down, do we say, “Man, he really messed up!” or, more likely, “Wonderful, he’s learning to walk!” However, when you fall down—blow the sales pitch, get passed over for the promotion, lose your job—often you feel as though you’ve failed. Worse yet, you may define yourself as a failure. It is better to view failure as a temporary and necessary step on the way to where you want to be. Just like falling down is a predictable and inevitable process for a toddler learning to walk, so, too, are the occasional failures that occur along the way to success in whatever you attempt. In fact, it’s hard to improve if you don’t fail, because lack of success delineates clearly where opportunities for improvement lie. So, when you do fall down, don’t label yourself a failure. Instead, recover quickly from temporary disappointments by asking “What can I learn from this? What worked and what didn’t? How can I do it better next time?” Then, follow the toddler’s example: Get up with a smile on your face and try again, knowing you are better for the experience. 2. Manage expectations, yours and theirs. Sometimes the problem with failure lies in unrealistic expectations when trying something new. People expect everyone to embrace a new strategy after a single roll-out meeting. You anticipate the new model-year car to perform as well as the old one that hadn’t changed for several years. You assume clients will flock to your latest and greatest product immediately. Rarely, however, are such scenarios the case. John Kotter, an authority on leadership and change, says that leaders exponentially under-communicate the need for change. Newly revised products often have bugs, and wary clients often have to be convinced over time that what is offered meets their needs and interests. Perception about failure on the back-end can be reduced or eliminated by managing expectations on the front-end. Begin new ventures with optimism tempered by realism, and help your constituents—both co-workers and clients—do the same. Anticipate that there will be problems, and let everyone know you will be ready to solve them. That way, when issues do arise, they will help reinforce your credibility instead of damaging it. And, problems won’t lead you and others to assume failure. Rather, they will be viewed for what they are—road signs pointing the way to progress. 3. Stop trying to be perfect. Sports psychologist Bob Rotella, PhD, wrote a helpful little book called Golf is Not a Game of Perfect (Simon & Schuster, 1995). Golf is not a game of perfect, and neither is business, or just about any other venture you might imagine, for that matter. Trying to be perfect can keep you from attempting new and untested methods for reaching your goals. The valuable experiments that ultimately lead to success will never happen if you are afraid to try them in the first place. In a vain effort at perfection, you might freeze up and keep whatever natural talent you have from taking over. Rather than striving for perfection, strive for action—bold, resolute action in the direction of your goals. You can make mid-course corrections as you go, but you’ll never have the chance if you don’t get started. Aiming for perfection is fine; expecting it, however, is unrealistic. Let your unrealistic expectations of perfection go and your results will start to flow. 4. Manage fear before it manages you. Perhaps nothing holds people back as much as fear. Fear is your natural protection against threats to physical survival. Too often, however, fear is triggered when physical survival is not an issue. No one is going to die if your promotion doesn’t come through. Physical harm won’t follow if your idea gets shot down at a meeting. You won’t lose an appendage if you return from your sales call empty-handed. Heck, even getting fired doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. Just because fear often gets triggered in these situations doesn’t mean you have to succumb to it. Gather yourself, take a deep breath, tell yourself you’re okay, and go about taking your next step forward, whatever it may be. Don’t let your autonomic nervous system convince you that you are about to get eaten by a tiger when you’re not. Learn to control your fear, or it will end up controlling you. 5. Stay in the moment. “What if?” can be a very useful question for anticipating scenarios and stirring creativity. “What if you doubled market share next quarter? What if you could take the best aspects of your competitors’ products and roll them into yours? What if you could use your expertise to aid the less fortunate in your community?” All good questions. Unfortunately, too often, your internal dialogue goes more like this: “What if I say something dumb at the meeting, and everyone laughs and decides I’m stupid? What if the economy takes a turn for the worse? What if the company gets bought out and I lose my job?” You begin to imagine negative what-if scenarios and put so much mental energy into them that you have little left over for more positive endeavors, and failures mount. To counter this trend, notice when you are becoming anxious. Then, pay attention to your thoughts. Likely, you have mentally raced ahead to some scary place that doesn’t exist. Bring yourself back to the here and now. Ask yourself, “What’s going on right here, right now?” It’s likely not nearly as bad as what you were imagining. Dealing with the realities of the moment will help you avoid creating unnecessary failures in the future . Think again |
 |
| Find this article at: http://www.skininc.com/articles/14986171.html |
Put your Life on Autopilot - Autoresponder Pilot, That IS
I’ve been using an autoresponder for a few months now. I presently am sending a Newsletter to my family…. brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces. It has been a great tool to keep everyone abreast of the happenings of my immediate family. I have had several positive comments and feel closer to everyone by sharing the accomplishments and landmarks of our lives.A reminder of birthdates and anniversaries, recollections of younger days, links to favorite photos and invitaions to future events have been fun to write about and appreciated by all.I send the Newsletter once a month. To date, the number of recipients has grown every month. ps…
The autoresponder has helped me in several ways:
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I use the provided HTML templates to bring color and form, as well as content, to my readers.
-
I pre-program the delivery of the Newsletter for the 15′th of each month.
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I can track how often the Newsletter is viewed.
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I save time by using the “personalize feature,” which sends the Newsletter to each recipient using their first name.
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I can insert HTML formatted links into the Newsletter, allowing for easy point and click viewing.
Overall, putting together the Family Newsletter has incresed my knowledge and workability of autoresponders for pleasure and business.
Why not put your life on autopilot, autoresponder pilot, that is!
Here’s to your success!
Bill
Fortune Magazine: Secrets of Greatness - Oct. 06
*** Valuable Information ***
What it takes to be great
Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work
By Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor-at-large October 19 2006: 3:14 PM EDT
(Fortune Magazine) — What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world’s premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was “wired at birth to allocate capital.” It’s a one-in-a-million thing. You’ve got it - or you don’t. Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful. Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant - talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great. Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, “The evidence we have surveyed … does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts.” To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness. The irresistible question - the “fundamental challenge” for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University - is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields. Scientists worldwide have conducted scores of studies since the 1993 publication of a landmark paper by Ericsson and two colleagues, many focusing on sports, music and chess, in which performance is relatively easy to measure and plot over time. But plenty of additional studies have also examined other fields, including business.
No substitute for hard work
The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice. Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule. What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He’d had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, “The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average.” In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years’ experience before hitting their zenith. So greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing? Practice makes perfect
The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition. For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that’s deliberate practice. Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, “Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.” Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It’s the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.
The skeptics
Not all researchers are totally onboard with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles. Two athletes might work equally hard, but what explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game? Researchers also note, for example, child prodigies who could speak, read or play music at an unusually early age. But on investigation those cases generally include highly involved parents. And many prodigies do not go on to greatness in their early field, while great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude. Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn’t do more than what he does; a five-footer will never be an NFL lineman, and a seven-footer will never be an Olympic gymnast. Even those restrictions are less severe than you’d expect: Ericsson notes, “Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s.” The more research that’s done, the more solid the deliberate-practice model becomes. Real-world examples
All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century’s greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don’t practice for three days, the world knows it.” He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti. Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he’d have been cut from his high school team.) In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice - passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow - practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up. Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that’s what it took to get even better.
The business side
The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements - you can practice them all. Still, they aren’t the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information - can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude. Instead, it’s all about how you do what you’re already doing - you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it. Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it - each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company’s strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.
Adopting a new mindset
Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they’re doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren’t just doing the job, you’re explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense. Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it’s the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset. Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don’t seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won’t come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says, “it’s as if you’re bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don’t know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don’t get any better, and two, you stop caring.” In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren’t lucky enough to get that, seek it out.
Be the ball
Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call “mental models of your business” - pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow. Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel (Charts) as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s (Charts) founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways. That’s a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice - and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.
Why?
For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That’s the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn’t be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from. The authors of one study conclude, “We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice.” Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, “Some people are much more motivated than others, and that’s the existential question I cannot answer - why.” The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life’s inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren’t gifted and give up. Maybe we can’t expect most people to achieve greatness. It’s just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn’t reserved for a preordained few.
It is available to you and to everyone.
About Me
I’ve been an employee all my working life…but in November 2007, I decided to pursue a different road. I am on a venture to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Follow me as I journey the road less traveled. I have come a long way…but have a long way to go. ….”on the road to greatness.”
